Quotes About Morality

Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice.

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

Man has learned how to challenge both Nature and art to become the incitements to vice! His very cups he has delighted to engrave with libidinous subjects, and he takes pleasure in drinking from vessels of obscene form!

Vice cannot be removed completely, nor is it right that it should be removed.

It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.

The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.

Ignorance and a narrow education lay the foundation of vice, and imitation and custom rear it up.

I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man.

What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

The tongue may be employed about, and made to serve all the purposes of vice, in tempting and deceiving, in perjury and injustice.

To all the rest of his Absurdities, (for vice is always unreasonable,) he adds one more, who expects that Vertue from another which he won't practise himself.

Vice is Washington's signature. A fish rots from the head, and Washington has led our country into vice, greed, selfishness, and the mockery and destruction of human life.

If you care enough to look right, you care enough to act right. And vice versa.

I'm always interested in what we're not being shown. So if you're playing ostensibly a quote-unquote 'baddie,' what are their good sides, and vice versa.

He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.

We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.

Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.

Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Human depravity originates in the vices of political constitution.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Human nature is not of itself vicious.